Wait, is 2018 over already? I managed to squeeze in a whole bunch of music listening this year, soundtracking every waking minute of my life with some fresh tunes streaming off the world wide webbings, passing through some algorithms harvesting my every play, skip and replay, traversing the atmosphere, finally emitting from whatever untethered speaker setup is handy at the moment. What a world.
Without further ado, here are my top ten albums of 2018:
10. Kacey Musgraves – Golden Hour
Darlin’, you take the high horse, and I’ll take the high road
If you’re too good for us, you’ll be good ridin’ solo
~ “High Horse”
Instantly wonderful. Front-loaded with catchy melodies and concepts ranging from the mundane to the holy, every touch is illuminated by Musgraves’ beautiful singing voice and distinct East-Texas twang. Hailing from Mineola, Texas, she represents a bright future both musically and with regard to the shifting, growing worldview of this generation, who must inherit the legacy of their damaged forebears.
9. Anenon – Tongue
Musician and composer Brian Allen Simon has delivered, “A jazz album, an electronic album, an ambient album, a classical album, an agnostic spiritual” in Tongue.
8. Oneohtrix Point Never – Age Of
And a tower casts a shadow
Fairest when you speak
I love it when I see you
In a state of disbelief
~ “Babylon”
Daniel Lopatin returns to his Oneohtrix Point Never alias to release one of the year’s most inscrutable albums. The auditory equivalent of stirring together every medium of analog and digital recording from the past 35 years, along with a light sauté of auto-tuned vocals. Age Of rewards many repeat listens.
7. They Might Be Giants – I Like Fun
We die alone, we die afraid
We live in error, we’re naked and alone
We die (Afraid)
~ “Last Wave”
Taking the highlights of their Dial-A-Song club and compiling them into a proper studio album, TMBG released a tightly-wound, anthemic album that functions just as well as a distracting and cerebral pop medley as it does as a polemic about America’s current political landscape. Death, despair and various forms of outrage fueled the Johns and propel the resulting material into the rarified air of a foot-tapping, hilarious album that is staring into the abyss the entire time.
6. Mountain Man – Magic Ship
Amelia Meath, Molly Sarle and Alexandra Sauser-Monnig comprise the vocal trio Mountain Man. If the sirens from O Brother, Where Art Thou? went into a remote studio to record an album with only their beguiling voices and a dusty songbook from an Appalachian cabin, I imagine that the result might resemble Magic Ship.
5. Mitski – Be the Cowboy
But as it is, and it is
We’re just two slow dancers
Last ones out
~ “Two Slow Dancers”
Mitski Miyawaki’s tour-de-force followup to 2016’s excellent Puberty 2 ups the ante in every possible way. Wall-to-wall hooks, incisive songwriting chops and a preternatural prowess for expressing complex and nuanced thoughts within a head-banger make this album a huge standout for me. Approachable, warm, and yet filled with hard edges.
4. Damien Jurado – The Horizon Just Laughed
What good is living if you can’t write your ending?
You’re always in doubt of the truths you’re defending
Seeing yourself in others’ ideas, I’ll write you from somewhere
And call you from later on
~ “The Last Great Washington State”
Damien Jurado is an artist who consistently shows up in my Year-End lists of best music. His songwriting sensibilities, soft, crooning voice, and laconic, gently bouncing tempo put me in a groove that I seldom want to get out of. His latest album, and the first produced without the aid of the late Richard Swift in a number of years, finds Jurado continuing to write short stories to cut his protagonists adrift in. But it’s a pleasure cruise as much as a spiritual journey.
3. Soccer Mommy – Clean
You’re made from the stars
That we watch from your car
And I’m just a victim of changing planets
My Scorpio rising and my parents
~ “Scorpio Rising”
A brand-new artist, to me, in 2018, Soccer Mommy is the solo project of Sophie Allison, currently based in Nashville, TN. Clean is a wistful, sad record that is constantly searching for the twinkle of light emanating from the heavens to chart a course by. Like every other album I’ve chosen for this list, it’s one that is rewards full, repeat listens. Pulling just one song or composition out of the whole seems do diminish the overall effect.
2. Beach House – 7
And I know you like it
So you try to hide it
And I know you like it
So I dive to find it
~ “Dive”
A number of years ago I wrote of Spoon’s album Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, in essence that, like JS Bach’s Goldberg Variations, they had created a body of work that so fully established their sonic fingerprint as at once recognizable and that seems so blatantly obvious when you hear it, that it almost makes you wonder if they have to try anymore. Repeat listens will reveal that, yes, they do try very hard indeed.
On Beach Houses’s 7th LP, aptly named 7, they’ve attained this same level of mastery. As though an entire planet was just finished being terraformed by only Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally, and now you can go live on it. The production values have gone up, the palette has evolved from a rural hamlet to a glittering metropolis with a full-on nightlife club scene.
1. Low – Double Negative
Saw you dancing when the fire went out
Before your breathe and barely audible
It’s more of let it out than let it go
It’s not the end it’s just the end of hope
~ “Dancing and Fire”
Low are the last musical act I ever expected to unleash the jangling, sonic avalanche of existential dread that is Double Negative. If ever there was a group whose sound seems to have cut the wagon tracks too deep to leave their path, they’d be it, in my book. Now, it seems to me that there is no group better-suited to deliver the harrowing message this one does.
Alan Sparkhawk & Mimi Parker have here repeatedly torn apart an entire album and then reconstructed it from salvage, eventually delivering the result that falls like the wrath of the gods, a thunderclap, visited with the same sudden violence and irresistible force as the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, blanketing your eardrums like Pompeii. Thoughts wink out, frozen inside your mind under a layer of ash that will preserve their shape for millennia
Double Negative is a harbinger of spiritual cataclysm; invective and paean disassembled to the atomic level and then bashed against each other to create an elemental reaction. Amidst the self-immolating bonfire of ‘christendom,’ Low is conducts the cacophonous orchestra unfolding its Requiem. A shattering achievement.
2018 Albums (a complete-ish list)
- The 1975 – A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships
- Adrienne Lenker – abysskiss
- Adventure Time – Adventure Time: Come Along With Me (Music from the Original TV Series)
- A.A.L. (Against All Logic) – 2012-2017
- Albert Hammond Jr. – Francis Trouble
- Alejandro Escovedo – The Crossing
- Alias – Forever is Orchestra
- Alias & Doseone – Less is Orchestra
- All Them Witches – ATW
- Alexandre Desplat – The Shape of Water
- Amen Dunes – Freedom
- Anenon – Tongue
- Arp – ZEBRA
- Arctic Monkeys – Tranquility Base Hotel + Casino
- Ashley McBryde – Girl Going Nowhere
- Beach House – 7
- Beacon – Gravity Pairs
- The Beths – Future Me Hates Me
- Betty LaVette – Things Have Changed
- Big Red Machine – Big Red Machine
- boygeniuis – boygenius EP
- Buffalo Tom – Quiet and Peace
- Calexico – The Thread that Keeps Us
- Camp Cope – How to Socialise & Make Friends
- Carter Burwell – The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
- Chaos Chaos – Chaos Chaos
- Christina Vantzou – No. 4
- Chromatics – Black Walls EP
- Chromatics – Blue Girl EP
- Chromatics – Camera
- Chromatics – Shadow (12 Inch Remixes)
- CHVRCHES – Love is Dead
- Cloud Nothings – Last Building Burning
- Cobra Man – New Driveway Soundtrack
- Cocteau Twins – Head Over Heels (Reissue)
- Cocteau Twins – Treasure (Reissue)
- Connan Mockasin – Jassbusters
- Courtney Marie Andrews – May Your Kindness Remain
- Damien Jurado – The Horizon Just Laughed
- David Byrne – American Utopia
- Dead Can Dance – Dionysus
- Death Cab for Cutie – Thank You For Today
- The Decemberists – I’ll Be Your Girl
- Devotchka – This Night Falls Forever
- Dirty Projectors – Lamp Lit Prose
- David Byrne – American Utopia
- Dungen & Woods – Myths 003
- Empress Of – Us
- Father John Misty – God’s Favorite Customer
- Field Report – Summertime Songs
- Flasher – Constant Image
- Frankel – The Future
- Geoff Knorr – Sid Meier’s Civilization VI: Rise & Fall (Original Game Soundtrack)
- Geotic – Traversa
- Goldfrapp – Silver Eye
- Goth Babe – Pacific II – Single
- Goth Babe – Point Mugu – EP
- Grouper – Grid of Points
- The Golden Filter – Still // Alone
- Haley Heynderickx – I Need to Start a Garden
- Hovvdy – Cranberrys
- How to Dress Well – The Anteroom
- I’m With Her – See You Around
- Janelle Monáe – Dirty Computer
- Jeff Tweedy – WARM
- Jeffrey Lewis – Works by Tuli Kupferberg (1923-2010)
- Jess Williamson – Cosmic Wink
- Jim James – Uniform Distortion
- Joey Dosik – Inside Voice
- Jóhann Jóhannsson – Mandy (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
- John Hiatt – The Eclipse Sessions
- Jon Hopkins – Singularity
- Johnny Jewel – Digital Rain
- Johnny Jewel – Themes for Television
- Johnny Jewel – Vapor
- Jonny Greenwood – Phantom Thread (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
- Josh Rouse – Love in the Modern Age
- JPEGMAFIA – Veteran
- Julia Holter – Aviary
- Kacey Musgraves – Golden Hour
- Karl Blau – Out Her Space
- Kelly Moran – Ultraviolet
- Kilchhofer – The Book Room
- Kurt Vile – Bottle It In
- Lala Lala – The Lamb
- The Lemon Twigs – Go to School
- Let’s Eat Grandma – I’m All Ears
- Lord Huron – Vide Noir
- Low – Double Negative
- Lucy Dacus – Historian
- Lykke Li – so sad so sexy
- Max Richter – Sleep
- Martyn – Voids
- MGMT – Little Dark Age
- Mitski – Be the Cowboy
- Mount Eerie – Now Only
- Mountain Man – Magic Ship
- The National – Boxer (Live in Brussels)
- Neko Case – Hell On
- Nils Frahm – All Melody
- Okkervil River – In the Rainbow Rain
- Oneohtrix Point Never – Age Of
- Oneohtrix Point Never – The Station EP
- Oneohtrix Point Never – Love in the Time of Lexapro EP
- Ought – Room Inside the World
- PAINT – PAINT
- Parquet Courts – Wide Awake!
- Paul Kelly – Nature
- Paul Simon – In the Blue Light
- Peggy Gou – Once EP
- Phosphorescent – C’est la Vie
- Pick a Piper – Distance
- Porches – The House
- Ramin Djawadi – Westworld: Season 2
- Ramp – Come Into Knowledge (1977)
- Rick and Morty – The Rick and Morty Soundtrack
- Richard Swift – The Hex
- Richard Thompson – 13 Rivers
- Robyn – Honey
- Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever – Hope Downs
- Roosevelt – Young Romance
- S U R V I V E – RR7400: LA041717
- S. Carey – Hundred Acres
- Say Lou Lou – Immortelle
- Sam Evian – Premium
- Shame – Songs of Praise
- Sigur Rós – Route One
- The Shins – Heartworms
- sir Was – Digging a Tunnel
- Snail Mail – Lush
- Soccer Mommy – Clean
- SOPHIE – OIL OF EVERY PEARL’S UN-INSIDES
- Spirit Award – Muted Crowd
- Spirit Fest – Anohito
- Spiritualized – And Nothing Hurt
- St. Vincent – MassEductation
- Stryper – God Damn Evil
- Sufjan Stevens – Lonely Man of Winter – Single
- Sunflower Bean – Twentytwo in Blue
- Superorganism – Superorganisms
- System – Plus
- Taraval – Aardvark – Single
- Thee Oh Sees – Smote Reverser
- They Might Be Giants – I Like Fun
- Tim Hecker – Konoyo
- Thom Yorke – Suspiria (Music from the Luca Guadagnino Film)
- Thor Rixson – Songs from the Bath
- U.S. Girls – In a Poem Unlimited
- Wild Nothing – Indigo
- Yo La Tengo – There’s a Riot Going On
- Young Fathers – Cocoa Sugar
- Yves Tumor – Safe in the Hands of Love
- Zola Jesus & Johnny Jewel – Wiseblood (Johnny Jewel Remixes)
Joel Manahan 